Recently, with the re-establishment of the POSI group, more people have been involved to some degree with the FRDCSA than ever before. The use of the FRDCSA core systems in POSI, while increasing the capabilities of the POSI services substantially, also contribute back to the FRDCSA as people become interested in extending the software.

Google Summer of Code Ideas

Written by Administrator

Wednesday, 11 March 2009 19:20

Our organization did not make it into GSOC for this year. However, if you would like, apply to work with me anyway on this project. There will be no stipend however.

The FRDCSA/POSI are looking for students to help pioneer some interesting technologies regarding free and open source software.

The FRDCSA is involved with numerous cutting edge research and developing topics. There are too many to list, in fact the project has a todo system with over 10,000 items.

POSI is a new free software collaboration experiment, which involves fine grained modeling of people's goals, interests and abilities in order to develop a plan to maximize the satisfaction of everyone's goals subject to the constraints of interest and ability.

If you have any questions, join #posi @ freenode, and tell "aindilis" something.

Keep in mind that our main development stack is Debian/Perl/Emacs - skill with these will increase the chance of your selection.

While all the propositions below are reasonably hard, with appropriate mentorship they will be possible for a student with programming skills. As our organization (and indeed even our GSOC project proposals) strives to educate, it is part of our ethos to help the student and others like her become skilful with the development and implementation of free software systems. We are looking to develop various systems:

If this is written (in fact a lot has been written, but still some work remains), we will be able to offer to the community software that helps users rapidly ramp up on certain technology areas. Note that this will work with the CLEAR system. This will be useful for training for companies and projects and will result in better skills. We are already using CLEAR and it's associated tools (like its Firefox extension) to great success.

GNU+Linux/Android Speech Recognition - for Android - get a basic small vocabulary grammar based speech recognition system (like CMUSphinx) working for the Android phone (using the simulator). Or, help with the acquisition of speech data for training free software Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition systems.

Developing voice recognition will enable the Verber Personal Planner to walk the users through doing various tasks, such as cooking (in the case of Gourmet), or any other task, by integration and RPC with their phone.

POSI Core Systems - Write software (semweb stuff) for the modeling of users Goals/Interests and Abilities for POSI systems such as it's IRC bots and web interfaces. Then help to organize contributors by accumulating data about their interests and shared goals (through free textual entailment recognition systems) and developing algorithms to schedule collaborative work on these tasks.

If the POSI Core Systems function, it will be easier for the project to identify the research intentions of its community and establish successful projects.

If RADAR/Packager are making more packages, it will ensure both the portability of the FRDCSA project, as well as massive reuse of the software that we package (provided we advertise our repository well enough).

Experience Modeling System (EMS) - develop software that, by analyzing writings (such as IRC logs, AIM chats, email, and text documents), as well as resumes and user's input, models what areas the subject is familiar with. Develop a subject area classification by mixing the LCC (Library of Congress Classification) system, with existing FLOSS subject ontologies, and extraction by text processing Wikipedia with techniques such as LSI (latent semantic indexing).

The EMS works with other areas of POSI such as the core systems and the Job Search system (Sample Resume/Job Matching system). It is vastly important for figuring out who can perform specific tasks. Who knows, maybe GSOC itself will use this eventually.

Gourmet Meal Planner - Develop the worlds first free and open source food ontology that can be used for various free software meal planners like Gourmet Meal Planner and Gourmet Recipe Manager. Do this by writing a module for Gourmet Recipe Manager that propagates ingredient description to SR20 entry mappings to a server.

If this is done, we will have done about as much as is mathematically possible to eliminate hunger, or at least bad-diet.

Verber is going to be a life saver for people with ADD, Schizophrenia, or Autistic Spectrum Disorders. It will provide the so-called execution function or "time-management skills" that they so injuriously lack. However, it will boost the time management skills of people without these conditions...

Natural Language Processing - (Sayer/Thinker) Develop state of the art natural language processing techniques for converting text to semantic representations and invoking theorem proving for understanding, as part of the Formalize/Sayer/Thinker systems.

Proper understanding of natural language will prove pivotal in the automatic creation of PDDL3.0 domains from goal statements (to help Verber along), as well as an abundance of other projects.

FRDCSA Virtual Machine Release - Complete the release of the entire FRDCSA on a Virtual Machine. While it is already in progress, this has been the achilles heel of the project - so far only privileged developers have access to the full project.

Do whatever you think would be a cool project. My goal is first to reconnoiter the student's goals/interests/abilities and then co-evolve a set of goals that satisfy the users' interests.